Scott Brown Returns To Dickhead Mountain

There was some question for a while about which Scott Brown it was that had packed up the old carpet bag and run off to New Hampshire, after Senator Professor Warren had the audacity to kick his world-historical-figure ass in 2012. Would it be Nice Scott Barncoat who charmed the Commonwealth in 2010, or would it be the truculent goober who ran for re-election?

"She votes with Elizabeth Warren. She votes with [Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed] Markey. She is the third senator from Massachusetts," Sununu told supporters at the Portsmouth rally before introducing Brown. "Scott's happiest days as a young man were in New Hampshire. ...So it's going to be great to have a senator that was born virtually in the state of New Hampshire. Jean Shaheen, by the way, was born in Missouri!" Did you catch how Sununu cleverly described Brown as "virtually born" in New Hampshire? He was actually born in Maine, which for Brown's campaign is close enough for government work and has the great advantage of being closer than Missouri and not being Massachusetts. It is also rather audacious to paint Shaheen as a "senator from Massachusetts," since Brown quite literally was, and very much wanted to remain, a senator from Massachusetts.

Hiring Papa Sununu and his poison glands is proof enough that you're decided to scale Dickhead Mountain one more time. But then there's this, also, too.

Brown's campaign, shepherded by GOP uber-consultant Eric Fehrnstrom, who in 2012 simultaneously ran Brown's unsuccessful Massachusetts re-election campaign and Romney's, plans to spend the next eight months pounding Shaheen with impunity for her support of the health care law.

If you lose two very high-profile campaigns -- one of them, the highest high-profile campaign there is -- on the same day, do you still qualify as an uber anything? Republican politics is so confoozling.

McDreamy can count on the support of the Boston Herald, of course. Our plucky little tabloid has been a Scott Brown fanzine for going on four years now. But Even The Liberal Boston Globe is going tender on him again. When he first was elected, the paper ran an embarrassing editorial in which it told us that we needed to give Scottie a break because he was the senator for all of us now. (It was enough to make you fwow up, pace Ms. Parker.) Now, they are continuing to give him the benefit if several big doubts.

Contrary to the popular stereotype of the New Hampshire voter as a flinty, 10th-generation farmer who traces his roots to a soldier in the Continental Army, about two-thirds of New Hampshire adults were born in another state - and a quarter of them were born in Massachusetts. Even in an era of mobility, New Hampshire stands out for its abundance of transplants: Only six states have a smaller proportion of native-born residents, according to Kenneth M. Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. This influx of residents is one reason Republicans feel hopeful about Brown's ability to shake off the interloper label.

First of all, nobody thinks that about New Hampshire voters any more, and nobody has since the death of Franklin Pierce. Second, New Hampshire has two Democratic members of Congress and a Democratic senator, and a majority Democratic state senate, and a Democratic governor. The feeling of most longtime New Hampshire Republicans is that this sorry state of affairs exists because of the influx of those reprobates from Taxachusetts. Poll numbers aside, the carpetbagger issue is not going to be the be-all, end-all of the race, no matter what the UNH poll says. The issue is whether or not Brown remembers how to campaign like a human being. He showed the white feather on a Senate race in Massachusetts against Ed Markey. He shopped around until he found a race he couldn't dodge. The question now is how he will run it. Things are not off to a promising start.

Charles P. PierceCharles P Pierce is the author of four books, mostly recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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